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HOME FIRES

The editors of Home Fires recently invited readers to send their recollections and photographs of members of the United States Armed Forces in acknowledgment of Veterans Day. Below is a selection of those remembrances submitted by friends and family of veterans, and from veterans themselves. Last year’s Lives During Wartime post can be read here.

— The Editors

David M. Behrman

Photo

Courtesy of David M. BehrmanCredit

This photo was taken in December 1965, just a few weeks after the Battle of Ia Drang Valley in the Central Highlands of South Vietnam. I was a member of Company A, Eighth Combat Engineer Battalion (Airborne), of the First Air Cavalry Division, which had its base camp at An Khe, South Vietnam. I was not involved in Ia Drang, but members of my division were, and in the aftermath of the battle (the subject of the 2002 Mel Gibson film, “We Were Soldiers”) the entire division was on high alert, and my unit was patrolling Highway 19 west-southwest of Pleiku. When the photo was taken, I had not bathed in a couple of weeks, and Christmas was just around the corner. I returned to the States in August 1966, finished my enlistment with the 82nd Airborne Division at Ft. Bragg, N.C., in January 1968, and returned to college at the University of Oklahoma that spring.

The editors of Home Fires are requesting the participation of readers for a post on Veterans Day, Nov. 11, 2013. If you are a veteran, or friend or relative of someone who served in the military and would like to share a written message or recollection, or a photograph recalling a veteran or their service, you can send it to us via e-mail at opinionator@nytimes.com.

Please read these guidelines carefully before submitting:

Written messages should be sent as standard e-mail text, not in an attachment. Please use your full name and hometown when submitting your message; and with photos, please use identifying information, including names, locations and dates when possible. Please put HOME FIRES in the subject line of your message.

Submissions may be edited for style, language or length before publication. Not all submissions will be included and we will not be able to respond to senders on the status of their submissions.

Photos should be sent to the same e-mail address as attachments. Images must be in the JPEG (*.jpg) format, digitally unaltered, and no larger than 5 MB. By submitting to us, you are promising that the content is original, doesn’t plagiarize from anyone or infringe a copyright or trademark, doesn’t violate anybody’s rights and isn’t libelous or otherwise unlawful or misleading. You are agreeing that we can use your submission in all manner and media of NYTimes.com and that we shall have the right to authorize third parties to do so. And you agree to the rules of our Member Agreement.

For examples of published submissions from previous years, read previous installments of “Lives During Wartime” — from 2009, 2010 or 2011.

Ten years ago this week, on March 20, 2003, the United States invaded Iraq.

The war officially ended on Dec. 15, 2011 — eight years, eight months, three weeks and four days later — when the last American forces withdrew. In the days between, hundreds of thousands of lives were altered irrevocably. Home Fires asked 16 veterans who served in Iraq to reflect on how their lives changed on the two dates bracketing the war. Their accounts will be published in Home Fires on consecutive days this week.

Listen

By Jake Siegel

I was in college, Army R.O.T.C., when the war in Iraq began. I watched the invasion on TV in my friend Michael’s apartment. After the bombing started, the arguments against the war that we’d been sounding out for months seemed beside the point. If I wasn’t entirely convinced by the administration’s claims, I no longer had to be.

The war was writing itself, and the terms had changed from “for / against” to “how” and “for what” and “at what cost.” I believed that freedom was a universal right and that sometimes it had to be won by force, but the war didn’t seem to need those ideas. It needed men, like me.Read more…

Ten years ago this week, on March 20, 2003, the United States invaded Iraq.

The war officially ended on Dec. 15, 2011 — eight years, eight months, three weeks and four days later — when the last American forces withdrew. In the days between, hundreds of thousands of lives were altered irrevocably. Home Fires asked 16 veterans who served in Iraq to reflect on how their lives changed on the two dates bracketing the war. Their accounts will be published in Home Fires on consecutive days this week.

Another Game

By Josiah White

March 20th, 2003: Every winter the drama department puts on a musical, but I don’t sing. Every spring is the play, alternating between drama and comedy. This year it’s “The Crucible.” I tried out and got the part of Reverend Parris, who has more lines than my last role in “The Pink Panther Strikes Again.” I’ve been watching the movie starring Daniel Day-Lewis. In two months I’ll be graduating, and with any luck making my way to join my friend in Burbank where we’ll begin our film careers.

Another war started today, not far from the last one. I don’t care much for it. Like many Americans, I posted patriotic rants on Internet message boards after 9/11, but my interest in the “War on Terror” has waned and my only knowledge about them comes from “Saturday Night Live.” My brother wants to join the Marines, but dyslexia keeps him out. Only jocks join the military anyway, not sensitive artistic types like me. Read more…

Ten years ago this week, on March 20, 2003, the United States invaded Iraq.

The war officially ended on Dec. 15, 2011 — eight years, eight months, three weeks and four days later — when the last American forces withdrew. In the days between, hundreds of thousands of lives were altered irrevocably. Home Fires asked 16 veterans who served in Iraq to reflect on how their lives changed on the two dates bracketing the war. Their accounts will be published in Home Fires on consecutive days this week.

Forces

By Phil Klay

A few days before the United States invades Iraq, one of my teammates collides with an Irish rugger so hard he somehow manages to knock himself out and has to be carried off the field, his body convulsing in the stretcher. The Dartmouth Rugby Team is on spring tour in Ireland, and our one relative strength is that when we land hits we cream the other players. We were raised on American football, after all, though this advantage doesn’t help us win. The Irish know the game, it’s their home turf, and they run circles around us. After the games, we outdrink the Irish and consider that our victory.

When Bush delivers his ultimatum to Saddam Hussein I watch it on television from my room in a Galway hotel. My roommate, a frighteningly strong and adorably stout Korean-American rugger, nicknamed “The Asian Square,” tells me his grandparents are prouder of his brother than they are of him. His brother goes to West Point — where General Douglas MacArthur went — and they still remember the Korean War.Read more…

Ten years ago this week, on March 20, 2003, the United States invaded Iraq.

The war officially ended on Dec. 15, 2011 — eight years, eight months, three weeks and four days later — when the last American forces withdrew. In the days between, hundreds of thousands of lives were altered irrevocably. Home Fires asked 16 veterans who served in Iraq to reflect on how their lives changed on the two dates bracketing the war. Their accounts will be published in Home Fires on consecutive days this week.

Swamps and Deserts

By Matt Gallagher

The muscular pause before the dawn of war found me wandering a swamp alone, looking for a small red light.

Like many Americans, I spent much of early 2003 watching angry debates about weapons of mass destruction and yellowcake. Unlike many Americans, as a 20-year-old attending college on an army R.O.T.C. scholarship, my future would be determined by those debates’ outcomes.

None of that mattered at the time. We were at Fort Jackson, S.C., for field training, conducting night land navigation. With map and compass in hand, all I cared about was finding that damn red light — the marker for the next assigned point.

I eventually found it. But while copying down the point’s alphanumeric code, I felt a cold pinch on my wrist that turned out to be a spider bite. By the time we returned to campus the next day, my joints had swollen up like balloons. I spent the next week doing an imitation of a half-paralyzed Michelin Man. My roommate, who’d spent his weekend protesting the imminent invasion of Iraq, had to open doors and beers alike for me, between grim discussions about intervention and dueling George W. Bush impressions. Read more…

Ten years ago this week, on March 20, 2003, the United States invaded Iraq.

The war officially ended on Dec. 15, 2011 — eight years, eight months, three weeks and four days later — when the last American forces withdrew. In the days between, hundreds of thousands of lives were altered irrevocably. Home Fires asked 16 veterans who served in Iraq to reflect on how their lives changed on the two dates bracketing the war. Their accounts will be published in Home Fires on consecutive days this week.

A Distant War

By David Abrams

As United States troops crossed the border between Kuwait and Iraq, heading north on their “thunder run” to Baghdad, I was as far away from the battlefield as you could get. I was a staff sergeant stationed in Alaska on a desk job, and I felt completely disconnected from what was happening halfway around the globe. That day, my unit had an early-morning formation for our physical training, all of us dressed in sweats, balaclavas and shoes fitted with spikes to keep us from slipping on the icy roads. As we ran, our breath crusting the balaclavas with frost, I thought of my fellow soldiers in Iraq who were at that very moment heading into the dark unknown of combat. But I didn’t think of them as people, as fighting machines of flesh, blood and bone; they were icons on a battle map, avatars in a video game, images from a news report. The war was not real. It was a movie I watched from the distance of the frozen north.Read more…

Ten years ago this week, on March 20, 2003, the United States invaded Iraq.

The war officially ended on Dec. 15, 2011 — eight years, eight months, three weeks and four days later — when the last American forces withdrew. In the days between, hundreds of thousands of lives were altered irrevocably. Home Fires asked 16 veterans who served in Iraq to reflect on how their lives changed on the two dates bracketing the war. Their accounts, including the three presented here, will be published in Home Fires over the next five days.

“A War, Before and After,” was initiated and led by Roy Scranton — an Iraq veteran, writer and co-editor of “Fire and Forget: Short Stories From the Long War,” an anthology of fiction by Iraq and Afghanistan veterans — who contacted and organized the contributors to this series.

What Did You Do?

By Eric Fair

“Imagine what you’d be doing right now if you were still in the Army.” This is what a fellow police officer says to me in Bethlehem, Pa., as we watch the start of the Iraq war on CNN. I’m in the records room, scanning decades of old police reports onto a computer. The scanner clicks and whines as a beam of light passes over each page. A heart murmur has ended my career on the streets. I can no longer be a police officer. I can no longer return to the Army. I sit in the records room and wonder what I’d be doing in Iraq if things had been different.

A few weeks later a detective enters the records room and says, “I’m looking for the former Army linguist who speaks Arabic.” He takes me to a Syrian restaurant in Allentown. The owner’s eldest son skipped bail on assault charges. The owner’s daughter serves us tea. Her English is poor. I interview her in Arabic. The detective says: “You’re good at this. You should be doing this in Iraq.”Read more…

Last week, the editors of Home Fires invited readers to send their recollections and photographs of members of the United States Armed Forces in acknowledgment of Veterans Day. Below is a selection of those remembrances submitted by friends and family of veterans, and from veterans themselves. Last year’s Lives During Wartime post can be read here.

— The Editors

Courtesy of Peter N. Shinn

Tessa Poppe

I was the public affairs officer for the Iowa National Guard’s 734th Agribusiness Development Team at F.O.B. Wright in Kunar Province Afghanistan between August 2010 and June 2011. The photo above is of Sgt. Tessa Poppe of Iowa City of the A.D.T.

Our team was a joint mission — both Army and Air National Guard — but it was primarily Army. I was one of only five airmen on the team, and I had some preconceived notions about soldiers, most of them unfavorable. My interservice stereotypes had been hardened by nearly 27 years in the Air Force, but it only took a few weeks of working with the soldiers of Iowa’s A.D.T. to show me my anti-Army biases were all wrong.Read more…

‘Checkpoint, Sorry’

As we circle Liberation Square en route to Haifa Street across the Tigris River, Yousif, who once worked for U.S. forces during the Iraq war, explains how to drive from point A to point B in today’s Baghdad. Sitting in the back passenger seat beside me, wearing a faded army winter coat and a kaffiyeh loosely wrapped around his neck, he grips his right hand on an imaginary steering wheel while holding his cellphone up to his ear to show me how it’s done. “O.K., you turn the corner and there’s another (expletive) checkpoint,” Yousif says.

There are hundreds of checkpoints throughout the city. Permanent checkpoints. Flash checkpoints. Soldiers standing guard with their index fingers reflexively manned over the trigger housing of their weapons, alert. “First, if it’s night, you must turn off the car’s headlights,” Yousif says. “Then, turn on the inside lights so they can see everybody inside the vehicle. Next, turn the sound down on the radio, or just turn it off. Roll the window down.” He takes a quick puff on his cigarette, then continues. Read more…

Home Fires features the writing of men and women who have returned from wartime service in the United States military. The project originated in 2007 with a series of personal accounts from five veterans of the Iraq war on their return to American life. It now includes dispatches from veterans of wars past and present.